Jaap Marais

Jaap Marais, leader of the verkramptes, died on August 8th, aged 77

FOR many years the policies of each leader of South Africa, however extreme, were made to seem moderate by those of his successor. If the pattern had continued, Jaap Marais would have seen his Afrikaner-supremacist ideology prevail. Instead he ended his days as a voice crying in the wilderness. He won grudging respect only for his die-hard integrity.

The ratchet to the racist right started in 1948 with the first post-war general election. The nearly all-white electorate then astounded the outside world by giving Daniel Malan's pro-apartheid Nationalist Party a majority over the United Party of Jan Smuts, an international statesman.

To the country's black masses, Malan seemed bad enough. But far harsher Afrikaner nationalists were to succeed him. First, from South Africa's Deep North, J.G. Strijdom, a hard man committed to “wit baasskap” (white mastery). He, in turn, was followed by Hendrik Verwoerd, the so-called Lenin of apartheid. Verwoerd became prime minister in 1958, the same year that Mr Marais was first elected to Parliament. And, as a backbencher, Mr Marais enthusiastically supported legislation to implement Verwoerd's master plan to confine most black South Africans to bleak rural reservations, known as Bantustans.

When Verwoerd was stabbed to death on the floor of Parliament in Cape Town in 1966, Private Eye, a satirical London fortnightly, commemorated his assassination with a cover picture of joyfully prancing Zulu warriors. The headline read: “Verwoerd: A Nation Mourns”. Yet Verwoerd was outflanked on the right by his successor, Johannes Balthazar Vorster. The new prime minister had been interned during the war for siding with the enemy in his capacity as assistant chief commandant of the pro-Nazi Ossewa-Brandwag (Ox-Wagon Sentinels). His severe suppression of black dissidents in his six years as Verwoerd's minister of justice proved he had not mellowed since then.

Far out on the far right

Unbelievable though it now seems, even Vorster was not extreme enough for Mr Marais. The cosmetic changes his government made in its segregationist policies to improve South Africa's image abroad, especially its very limited acceptance of multiracial sport, provoked such vituperative fury from Mr Marais and other die-hards that they were dubbed verkramptes (the cramped ones) and expelled from the Nationalist Party in 1969.

Mr Marais was not subdued. Vorster's government was, he said, “the biggest kaffir-loving government in the world.” He promptly helped found the Herstigte Nasionale Party (HNP), which chose Albert Hertzog as its leader. Hertzog had impressively reactionary credentials: as minister of posts and telecommunications he had done his best to delay the arrival in South Africa of television, “the devil's box”.

The founders of the HNP refused to translate its name into English. Their rejection of bilingualism underlined their aim to make Afrikaans and Afrikaners paramount in South Africa. For Mr Marais, who was to lead the increasingly marginalised HNP from 1977 until his death, this was no mere gesture.

His father was among the first Boer volunteers captured during the 1899-1902 war; his mother was interned in a concentration camp. On the family farm, young Marais was brought up on stories of the sufferings of his volk. Unlike many of the Boer leaders, including Smuts, he was never able to forgive the British for “this utterly shameful chapter in their history.” He was proud to be known as a bittereinder and in a letter to the press days before his death railed against the perfidies of his English-speaking compatriots.

Mr Marais was just as unyielding when, in the late 1980s, F.W. de Klerk's government brought most white South Africans reluctantly round to the idea of black majority rule. To his dying day he continued to recall the good old ways of apartheid and to predict the eventual inevitable collapse of a foolhardy experiment with multiracial democracy. He was, said an awed foe, “as unyielding as Oom Paul [Kruger].”

Despite Mr Marais's fanatical views, efforts by his critics to portray him as a racist thug never quite hit the mark. Once he stepped down from a political platform, where his defamatory speeches provoked baying applause from audiences of poor whites, he was courteous and considerate even to politicians whose liberal beliefs he detested.

He was a connoisseur of fine wine and he never allowed his grievances over the Boer war, and over the gradual eclipse of Afrikaans by the English language in South Africa, to blind him to the glories of English literature. T.S. Eliot and John Keats were among his favourite poets; he was proud of being the translator of Shakespeare's “Julius Caesar” into Afrikaans.

In contradiction to the usual cartoonist caricatures of right-wing extremists, Mr Marais could also laugh at himself. Away from politics, he was a bird fancier dedicated to breeding a pure black budgerigar. When challenged about his lifelong failure to produce such a bird, he said it only went to prove that it was against the laws of nature to challenge the colour bar.